In this conversation, we trace one thread that runs through Rubel’s dissertation: the recurring belief that each new dating technology — a 1960s IBM mainframe, a 1970s home video camera, a 1980s telephone chat line, today’s matching algorithm — is finally the rational, honest alternative to the mess of ordinary courtship. We talk about the “omniscient” mainframes that launched computer dating on college campuses, the fraud scandals and consumer-protection laws that followed when that trust collapsed, the industry’s decades-long split between “marriage-minded” businesses and the rest, and how the internet quietly dissolved that divide.

That bet collided almost immediately with a public fight: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared flatly that you can’t teach a coal miner to code, while Mark Zuckerberg insisted you could. Thompson’s reporting shows both were partly right — coding did open up as a route to the middle class, but it also split into castes, with boot-camp grads and career-changers doing lower-paid “pink-collar” front-end work while an elite, credentialed tier captures the real money in machine learning and infrastructure.

In this episode, we go deep on that single argument and push it into the present. Now that AI coding tools can generate exactly the kind of templated, entry-level code that was supposed to be the on-ramp for people like the Kentucky miners, is the blue-collar coding promise still alive, or did AI just kick away the bottom rung of the ladder? Thompson helps us find out.

In this conversation, we trace one of the sharpest and most unsettling arguments in The Computer Boys Take Over: that the familiar stereotype of the antisocial, mathematically-gifted male programmer wasn't simply discovered by the computer industry — it was manufactured, through a decades-long feedback loop of unvalidated hiring tests and personality profiles. We talk about the 1960s programmer shortage that made mass psychometric testing feel necessary, the strange science behind instruments like the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, how a hiring apparatus quietly became a gender filter, and why that history still echoes in the whiteboard and take-home coding tests of today. ATT #003 — Aryan Talks Tech

He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including A History of Modern Computing — long a standard text in the field — Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, on the overlooked Washington-area tech corridor; Computing: A Concise History; Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, a companion volume to the Smithsonian exhibition he co-curated; and, most recently, A New History of Modern Computing, co-written with Thomas Haigh. He also curated or co-curated major NASM exhibitions, including Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age and Time and Navigation.

This episode centers on his 2018 book GPS — a sharp history of how a satellite system born from a genuine rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force, tested in secret, and deliberately degraded for military security, became something a billion people depend on without a second thought. We trace that transformation from Cold War submarine tracking to the phone in your pocket, and use it as a case study for a larger question: what does the history of one piece of invisible infrastructure tell us about the digital infrastructure — AI included — being built today, under strikingly similar institutional conditions.

In this conversation, we discuss why the human computing workforce never translated its labor into prestige for the field it built, where computing's intellectual authority actually came from, and John von Neumann's outsized role in giving computing its identity as a theoretical discipline.